Dynamic mobile agent based distributed network management using Internet technology and CORBA

The growing heterogeneity in modern communication networks caused by increased connectivity and diversity of the network elements brings us new challenges for network management. Providing more scalable and robust management architecture while not imposing an excessive overhead on the network resources becomes increasingly important. Furthermore, with the development of Internet technologies and distributed computing such as World Wide Web, JAVA and CORBA, management from anywhere is becoming a reality. The objective of the paper is to extend the classical centralized management paradigm by introducing the mobile network management agent that can be invoked by the management stations in respect of their own policies and can dynamically extend its function for the specific requirements in each domain. This new framework provides us a scalable, flexible and robust way to extend legacy computing environments to the Web. Accordingly netload and workload of the distributed network management environment are reduced both by doing management as close as possible to the managed devices and by transmitting only network management related information over the Internet. The background issues leading to our approach, the architecture and implementation aspects of our network management system in a CORBA environment are included. The advantages compared with the traditional CGI based solutions are also discussed